How the Tea Party Will Die

Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) -- All together now: We like democracy
because ... why? The pathologies of the U.S. version are so
obvious in the aftermath of the latest averted crisis that we
need to ask ourselves whether it’s worth it -- and why electoral
democracy hasn’t self-destructed before. Should Tunisians or
Egyptians opt for the Chinese model, where rational autocrats
may restrict rights, but no one threatens to blow up world
markets in the name of an 18th-century tax protest?

There is an answer: Democracy is self-correcting, at least
where it works. The key to the process is a version of supply
and demand. When a politician acts in a way that doesn’t serve
the voters’ interests or desires, demand for that person’s
services should decline. Another candidate who fills the demand
will get elected.

Some democratic systems do this at the level of the
individual candidate, some at the level of the party. In a
winner-take-all district-based system as in the U.S. Congress,
the market is structured to drive elected officials toward the
median voters in their districts, and a two-party system usually
emerges. In a proportional-representation parliamentary system,
the market allows for multiple niches of interest-based parties,
which then form coalitions that satisfy their voters’ policy
preferences.

So why isn’t the U.S. system working as it usually does to
produce moderate elected officials? As recently as the 1990s,
critics of two-party democracy charged that its virtue was
actually a flaw: that the Democrats and Republicans were so
similar as to be indistinguishable on core economic issues. The
U.S., they charged, had no meaningful liberal (or conservative)
option to satisfy the preferences of voters who wanted radical
change.

Fiscal Discipline

Then came the Tea Party movement, born of two shifts in
U.S. politics. One is a growing demand among some voters for
meaningful fiscal discipline. After the George W. Bush
administration failed to reduce the deficit and even expanded
discretionary spending, some Republican voters decided their
party’s mainstream couldn’t be trusted to achieve this aim. The
party of Bush was, after all, acting as the model predicts,
aiming itself toward the median voter and therefore not cutting
popular social welfare programs. The Tea Party movement began as
a challenge within the Republican Party by members who weren’t
seeing their preferences served.

Under ordinary circumstances, the party would’ve had to
balance this internal pressure against the necessity of
capturing the median voter -- a challenge, to be sure, but
perhaps not an impossible one. Yet here the second weird feature
entered the picture.

During roughly the same period of the Bush administration,
Republicans captured control of the legislatures in many
majority-Republican states. Once in office, they systematically
redistricted (the polite word for gerrymandered) to assure safe
Republican seats in Congress, dividing Democratic voters among
majority Republican districts.

Democrats challenged these changes in the courts -- and
lost. The U.S. Supreme Court held, more or less, that political
gerrymandering was part of the game, permissible so long as it
wasn’t motivated by race. This posed a small technical challenge
for the redistricters, because black and Latino voters skew
Democratic. Their ingenious solution, consistent with the letter
of civil-rights law, was to create Democrat-dominated districts
that would elect racial minorities, keeping the numbers of
minority representatives stable while still reducing the number
of Democratic districts.

Conservative Districts

The result was that many gerrymandered Republican districts
emerged where the median voter stood far to the right of the
median voter in the state, or the nation.

Some of this rightward shift would have happened naturally
as a result of the clumping that occurs as people choose to live
near others who share their views. Distinguishing the effects of
clumping from those of redistricting is tricky.

But the outcome is clear: Safe Republican districts gave us
the Tea Party. This is why the Tea Party is so much stronger in
the House than in the Senate: Senate districts are states, which
can’t be gerrymandered.

Freed from chasing the median national voter, Tea Party
representatives could move far to the right without fear of
being voted out of office. The motivated voters who showed up
for primaries pushed out more moderate Republicans still playing
the old game.

The disastrous consequence for Republicans is a self-perpetuating party-within-a-party that doesn’t care if it makes
the wider party unelectable nationally. Tea Party supporters
think they are fighting for the Republican soul, and they are:
If they win, they will drive the party so far from the median
voter that a Republican president will become unimaginable.

In theory, this problem should be self-correcting, as
Republican voters realize that protest politicians won’t serve
their real interests, and replace them with moderates more
willing to compromise. If this doesn’t occur, the Republican
national leadership will have to push for further redistricting
at the state level to help elect more moderate party members.

If neither of these things happens, the Republican Party
will wither and die. It can’t sustain itself as a permanent
minority party that can’t elect a president. A new, more
moderate alternative to the Democrats will arise. It’s happened
before. The market may need time, but it will shake out.

So if you’re wondering why the U.S. keeps democracy, you
have your answer. Markets inflict pain, but over time they tend
to connect consumers with what they want.

(Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard University and
the author of “Cool War: The Future of Global Competition,” is
a Bloomberg View columnist. Follow him on Twitter at
@NoahRFeldman.)